A woman called Zion police last July to report a harrowing experience. Her former live-in boyfriend allegedly pointed the barrel of a silver handgun to her forehead during an argument and threatened to kill her, records show she told police.

The woman received paperwork given to alleged domestic violence victims, and she told the officer she planned to seek an order of protection, according to the police report for the July 18 incident. The Lake County state's attorney's office later approved a domestic battery charge against her former boyfriend and signed a warrant for his arrest.

Nevertheless, two days later, a Zion building inspector sent an imposing letter to the apartment complex's ownership. Based on the police response for assault and battery and the unlawful use of weapons, the property was "in danger of being classified a chronic nuisance," the letter read. The owners had 10 days to propose a nuisance abatement strategy or face legal proceedings if the activity continued, the letter said.

Under a local "crime-free" ordinance, Zion officials may declare properties a nuisance and effectively evict residents temporarily by prohibiting occupancy for 30 to 80 days. The warning letters are the first step to declaring a property a nuisance, and opponents of such ordinances — which have been implemented in communities across Illinois — say they may disproportionately target racial and ethnic minorities and can harm low-income crime victims.

"These types of policies aren't good for anyone," said Howard Handler, government affairs director at Illinois Realtors, a group advocating for private property rights across the state. "They drive investment out of the community. They drive homeowners out of the community."

Zion sent a similar letter to the landlord of a woman who called police June 24 and told an officer she had been raped, records show.

"You have a woman calling for rape, and then they use this ordinance against her, or against the property, but it still affects her," Handler said.

Zion officials said they no longer send warning letters to domestic violence victims and recently have made other changes to the city's nuisance property enforcement program.

In an interview, Zion Mayor Al Hill acknowledged past enforcement problems with the ordinance and said the city has since changed its response to potential nuisance properties. He said the city sends fewer letters and no longer enforces the ordinance against domestic violence callers or tenants who are crime victims. Warning letters have to be approved by a supervisor before they are sent, he said.

Handler sent a letter to Hill and the Zion City Council on Nov. 16 raising concerns about the city's enforcement of its nuisance property ordinance. He had counted the number of violation notices related to the ordinance that were issued between January and July 2016.

By Handler's count, he wrote in the letter, Zion had not sent out any violation notices during the first five months of 2016 and 29 letters between May 23 and July 31. At least 10 of the letters, by Handler's count, appeared to be sent to those who were potential crime victims, not perpetrators, he said.

Hill said Friday that 76 warning letters in total have been sent since May, suggesting the rate of sending letters has gone down since the initial rash of violation notices last year. He also said the city has never "initiated any action to actually take a property or ... take the occupancy permit," which he said was evidence that the city was getting properties to comply with the ordinance and abate nuisances.

Richard Ianson, director of the city's building department, estimated that the city sends out an average of one or two violation notices per week and some weeks hasn't sent out any. The rate went down after the changes were made last summer, he said.

"We decided to streamline it and just go with the more serious offenses," Ianson said.

Zion's nuisance abatement program was renewed and updated in May 2016 after it had previously been discontinued due to budget cuts, meeting minutes show. The update specified that the ordinance could be enforced by either the city's Police Department or Building Department. The Lake County Housing Authority, which administers federal Section 8 housing vouchers for low-income residents, was aware of the update and its implications, according to meeting minutes.

Hill said the city made adjustments to its enforcement strategy "many months" prior to receiving Handler's letter in November.

One of Handler's concerns was that violation notices were being sent after the first time police responded to properties and found one of 13 "nuisance activities" defined in the ordinance, which include disorderly conduct, sexual abuse, assault, illegal consumption of alcohol and unlawful use of weapons.

But the ordinance says the warning notice should be sent — to both the landowner and the occupants, if the occupants are renters — after police find two instances of nuisance activity at a given property. The ordinance allows the city to "commence a legal proceeding to abate the nuisance" if the property owner does not respond to the notice within 10 days.

The property is classified as a "chronic nuisance" if the police respond and find nuisance activity three times in 180 days. It is then subject to being "closed and secured against all use and occupancy."

"That was a mistake," Hill said when asked about the city's prior practice of sending violation notices after the first incident involving a nuisance activity, rather than the second. The city has corrected the issue, he said.

It was one of "a couple mistakes" that Hill acknowledged about the city's enforcement strategy.

"One of them was about a domestic, and we were threatening to the woman who lived there," said Hill, who was elected in April 2015. "And we've corrected that."

Records show the city also sent violation notices after police responded to assist a mentally impaired man who had allegedly been stabbed, a woman who had allegedly been physically threatened by her son and a man who told police he had been "jumped" in his home by his roommate and was later placed in an ambulance.

A state law passed in 2015 — in reaction to crime-free ordinances such as Zion's — prohibits municipalities from penalizing tenants or landlords for contacting police to report domestic violence. The same protections extend to people with physical or mental disabilities in such cases.

The Associated Press reported at the time that more than 100 communities across the state had such property nuisance regulations, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois and the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law alerted 42 Illinois cities that their policies were especially out of sync with the new law.

Kate Walz, director of housing at the Shriver Center, said in a recent interview that Zion's enforcement strategy in 2016 was "concerning" and said municipalities run into "potential legal problems" when they "have these kind of ordinances and when they enforce them in an aggressive manner."

A 2013 Shriver Center report concluded that such ordinances "present numerous potential pitfalls that can cause serious harm to tenant households, landlords and the community at large, and expose municipalities to legal liability."

"These ordinances can reduce the supply of rental housing, displace crime victims and others who need to reach out to the police for help, chill reporting of crime to the police in the first place, increase the number of vacant properties and the rate of family homelessness, deny persons with disabilities the opportunity to access housing that is integrated into the community, and prevent persons with criminal records from finding stable housing," the report found.

Sasha Samberg-Champion, an attorney with the Washington, D.C.-based firm Relman, Dane & Colfax specializing in civil rights and housing justice issues, estimated that hundreds of crime-free ordinances such as Zion's exist nationwide, part of a "get-tough-on-crime movement" that began in the 1990s, he said. He said such ordinances raise First Amendment issues because they can produce a "chilling" effect on someone's willingness to call the police for assistance because they fear losing their housing.

"They obviously have a disparate effect and an unfair effect on survivors of domestic violence, who are mostly women, as well as other crime victims," Samberg-Champion said. He added that people with disabilities are often disproportionately affected and that studies have shown the police often don't enforce the ordinances evenhandedly across cities.

"They tend to be enforced much more vigorously in predominantly minority areas," he said.

Hill said the idea the ordinance is discriminatory is "laughable."

"The reason we're doing it is to protect the lower-income (residents) and the people who don't have the means to fight for themselves and who are being taken advantage of by the landlords," Hill said.

Absentee landlords "often don't care what the living conditions are of their tenants, so we've put these in place to protect life-safety issues for those who can't fight for themselves," he added.

He said landlords in Zion "need to take responsibility for who they're renting to."

"This goes for any rental unit — if they are places where crimes are taking place, we expect that the landlords are going to assist us in ensuring that we get good people here," Hill said. "And the definition of 'good people' has absolutely nothing to do with how much money they make. It has to do with how they act. And (if) landlords are not doing background checks and not doing reference checks … then we have a problem with it."

The city under Hill also has changed another aspect of its policy toward rental units. The council passed a rental certification inspection program in 2015 and imposed a biennial $75-per-unit fee (up to a maximum of $10,000) upon landlords wishing to rent property in the city. The inspection makes sure rental units are up to city code.

Landlords complained when the inspection fees were under consideration in October 2015, arguing other municipalities in the area don't charge or require anywhere near what Zion was proposing for rental inspections. Hill replied that 60 percent of Zion's living units are rentals and that "a healthy community has 23 percent rental units."

"Zion has 3.5 percent the population of Lake County," Hill said as the council deliberated the inspection fees at the time. "We have 38 percent of the Section 8 vouchers that Lake County gives out. And it's an issue that we have to address. … We have to get our arms around all the rest of the issues that are associated with too many rental units and too much Section 8 rental units."

TBS Group, a limited liability company that owns rental property in Zion, sued the city, alleging the inspection fee ordinance violates the federal Fair Housing Act, targets renters "based on race and national origin" and "has a disparate impact on African-American and Latino renters," according to a complaint filed in June.

Minorities "comprise a large percentage of all renters in Zion and an even larger amount of those who rent the housing, considered substandard, that is the target of this ordinance," TBS Group alleged in the complaint.

"Now, renters and landlords will have to have certification before Section 8 benefits are renewed," the complaint reads.

A federal judge in January granted the city's motion to dismiss the complaint. A group of rental property owners is also posing an ongoing challenge to Zion's rental inspection program in Lake County Circuit Court, alleging the city doesn't have the authority to impose the program, said Terry Boone, one of the plaintiffs.